Last week, Wikipedia’s official blog announced that the popular online encyclopedia and JSTOR, one of the world’s leading scholarly journal databases, have entered into a partnership that will see Wikipedia’s top contributors gain access to thousands of journals. The move comes in response to Wikipedia’s contributors asking for the site to find more reliable source material for them to draw upon.
In the past, one of the main criticisms of Wikipedia has been the quality of citations; currently, most are pulled from whatever Google brings up on the topics. However, this move should see the quality of Wikipedia’s citations improve dramatically – likely much to the excitement of university students everywhere, and their professors.
Those looking to gain access to JSTOR by becoming a Wikipedia editor will have to look elsewhere, however. As it currently stands, only the site’s top 100 contributors will gain access to the journal database. [Slate]
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Igor Bonifacic is a writer working for the Toronto Standard. You can follow him on twitter at @igorbonifacic.
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